Jahnke’s Thoughts

One of my closest friends during University plays floor-ball. For my ex-girlfriend Kathryn, it was dance. My old boss at MIT was an incredible artist, with a niche comic book franchise world wide. A lot of the time, I feel like I’m missing my thing. You know, that thing you want to do all the time, and never get bored of. The one that you obsesses over, and are super passionate about. Don’t get me wrong – I have hobbies. I like playing squash, I go to the gym four of five times a week to run or lift weights. I read a lot about politics and current events, and am really in to technology. I’m starting my MBA part time in August and have a full time job. Playing poker and shooting pool always makes me happy. I’ve traveled internationally, and have done a ton of camping and canoeing trips. I guess it just doesn’t seem like any of those are my thing, or that I’m doing them often enough.

I remember in high school, my thing was music. I listened to a ton of it, knew how all the major artists were connected, and played saxophone obsessively. I was good at it, had a ton of people I could play with, and it was great. Jazz band practice for hours every week, the classical quartet, marching band, private lessons, the ska band, jamming randomly with friends in basements. My buddy Nick and I used to skip our lunch periods and play in the music rooms. Then, when I got to University, I stopped making the time and didn’t put in as much effort. I got distracted by school, friends, other priorities – in hindsight – most of them wasteful and self indulgent. I wasn’t in the music department, and soon, the skill curve seemed insurmountable. Now, I can barely read music. I feel embarrassed and guilty. No wonder it doesn’t feel like my thing anymore.

It seems that some people are lucky, and innately know their thing. Photography, a job or business they’re super passionate about and engaged with, a sport or a volunteer organization – there are tons of them. It feels like it’s something very lacking in my life right now. I know it will take hard work, time, effort, and a deliberate thought process. A thing makes life exciting. I could look forward to it, feel energized by it, get inspiration from it, and be creative with it. I need a thing.

I was watching TV on Saturday, and I noticed at the end of a VW commercial that, rather than their website, they had the URL to their facebook fan page. This reminded me of an experience in 1999, when I was in my first year of University and “the Internet” as we know it today was just becoming a reality. I finished a snickers bar, and noticed on the wrapper that they had their website printed on it. It got me asking ‘why on earth would someone go to snickers.com’ ? I mean sure, there would be nutritional information and stuff, but it seemed that basically you were subjecting yourself to more advertising and branding, I mean, you’d have to really like snickers.

Today, with facebook fan pages, users can interact with their favorite brands and companies, and discover other people that have similar interests. It makes sense that corporations and brands would want to partner with facebook – it’s so ubiquitous. What branding and marketing professional wouldn’t want influencers to self select to be a fan of their product, sharing this information with their entire friend network, just like they have for a government office, a type of food, or an actor?

It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out, and how companies will evolve in promoting their brands and products on facebook. So far, my friends at Involver have told me they’ve had the most success with their integrated facebook fan page platform through exclusive offers and valuable coupons.

Julie Supan, the senior director of marketing at youtube came and spoke at the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford last Thursday. It was a great discussion and interesting to hear her insights and experience about video, social media, and the tech industry.

Although she wouldn’t give us an exact ratio, she repeated a few times that far more people consume that create video on youtube. One challenge she said many companies continue to face is how to entice people – especially influencers – to create videos. She argued the goal should be to get people to collaborate, not create. She referenced a campaign launched by 1-800-Flowers that attempted to solicit user generated video that failed miserably as a career ender for the creative director. Her big insight was that clever, authentic, and entertaining content is key, and that literal doesn’t always translate. Implied messages often work better, and before embarking on creating anything, it’s important to think about goals. Who is your audience, and are you committed to engaging them? Leave the viewer wanting more, and keep in mind that word of mouth is still the most powerful and underrated distribution channel. At the end of the day, this is what most companies are trying to tap into.

Continuity and releasing videos incrementally are important, but repetition is key. I have seen the importance of repetition in our fundraising videos and messaging. It’s important to keep the story moving, and keep promoting the target behavior, even after “it” has “launched”. Spend time thinking about how your video will move through the entire ecosystem of your world, but more importantly, the world of your target audience. Tap into the zeitgeist and collective conscious. Remember that people seek fame.

Julie concluded by giving us some insight about the future of youtube – channel expansion and curator status are currently the big goals for the company.

We launched our first big email of Stanford’s class of 2009 Senior Gift Campaign late Thursday morning. This video, created by the boys over at Songline Media, is the best one I’ve used in my five year professional fundraising career. We used Involver’s player, embedded on our main page that is hosted on the Stanford server.

We sent a total of ~1,600 emails to current seniors. 81 had already donated and 1,498 had not. 47% of donors (38 seniors) and 46% of non-donors (689 seniors) opened the email.

Of those that opened the email, 3 donors (4%) and 235 non-donors (34%) clicked the jpeg image to start watching the video that was hosted on our main Senior Gift website. A total of 34 (14%) of seniors that watched the video ended up clicking the give now button and making a gift to the campaign, all in less than 4 days.